by Fink, Jesse
Larry Yasgar agrees with his old boss: “Good old John Kalodner. John took credit for everything except the sinking of the Titanic.”
Chris Gilbey remembers meeting him one year at the music-industry trade fair Midem, in Cannes: “He didn’t know who I was, told me that he had discovered AC/DC and because of that should be respected—or some such drivel.”
“Minimal impact,” says Michael Browning. “He pretends that he discovered them, which is nonsense. Certainly he was influential in convincing Jerry that they were worth doing something with, but beyond that there wasn’t much involvement.”
* * *
Michael Klenfner was another polarizing figure inside Atlantic. Where the bearded Kalodner was wiry, lean and enigmatic, the mustachioed Klenfner was sweaty, corpulent and not shy about saying what he thought, even if it put some noses out of joint. Outside of his work with AC/DC, Klenfner is best known for having turned John Belushi’s and Dan Aykroyd’s Saturday Night Live act, The Blues Brothers, into recording artists. Briefcase Full of Blues, their 1978 album for Atlantic, went to #1 in the American charts.
Invited to form what one ex-staffer called the “road artist development & touring department” at Atlantic when he left his position as head of FM radio promotion at Arista Records in 1977, Klenfner’s “bull-in-a-china-shop” style of management (a description used by a number of people interviewed for this book) eventually got him offside with Greenberg and saw him leave the company in acrimonious circumstances.
“Michael loved AC/DC,” says Judy Libow. “He was very close to the band. He fought to keep them at Atlantic. Michael was really kind of their champion. And to whatever degree he could speak for them and work internally on their behalf he did. His influence then had an effect on the other executives, who had to make decisions that he wasn’t in a position to make.”
Steve Leeds takes the same position: “I think the people that were really responsible for championing AC/DC were Phil Carson, who signed them, and Michael Klenfner, because he believed in them more than anybody else in the company. And he was like an attack dog. He wouldn’t let go. We’re going to break this band, we’re going to break this band, we’re going to break this band. People at the time were ready to walk away from the project because it was just too difficult and nobody was really embracing the band.
“I didn’t like Michael and we never got along. He parenthetically came into the company to disrupt the promotion department, of which I was a key person, so I’m not a fan. I tell you with total disclosure I was not a fan. But I have to say he really, really championed the band when nobody else in the company would. I’ll give him that. Atlantic had a product flow of a lot of music and a lot of releases and it was easy for it to be skipped over and go to the next project. Long-term thinking, even in those days, was not really what people did.”
Carson, too, remains a believer in Klenfner’s legacy: “There is no doubt that Michael got behind AC/DC when he joined Atlantic. He visited London shortly after he came on board. I believe he was trying to sign Bay City Rollers. I told him not to waste his time with them and that he should get behind AC/DC. He took a close look at the project, realized that this band had not reached its potential and really encouraged the marketing and promotion departments to spend more time and money on AC/DC. I think that was a major part in the development of the band.”
Only Yasgar and former Aerosmith manager David Krebs sound a different note, crediting head of artist relations Perry Cooper for being the band’s gamebreaker inside Atlantic.
Cooper saw himself in that way, too, going on what he told Susan Masino in her book before he died. When Jerry Greenberg had given Klenfner and Cooper a film of AC/DC to watch, Klenfner, he said, “didn’t give a shit” and asked his lieutenant to look at it for him. From that point, Cooper was under their spell.
“Klenfner was a fan,” says Krebs. “Cooper was very much an enthusiast behind the band.”
“We were all behind them at Atlantic,” says a bemused Yasgar. “I don’t even know what Michael Klenfner’s involvement was. The group always asked for Perry Cooper.”
Which could well be the truth. Renée Cooper, Perry’s daughter, tells me: “AC/DC and my father were really tight. After Bon died, my dad and Brian became best friends. When Bon passed, they found the emergency-person-to-contact card and it was my dad.”
“There was so much internal bullshit going on, with everybody trying to take credit for it when it broke,” says Yasgar. “We had a ton of people in promotion that got involved and then they would come to me, ‘Look, Larry, it’s going on in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Make sure we get stock there.’ I would make sure we had stock in the area. I just had to follow all the records. That was my main job. And if they didn’t have stock in an area, if it wasn’t pressed yet or whatever, I would have at least 50 in my office to cover the airplay and just ship it to the stores so they would have it in.”
Bill Bartlett, however, doesn’t separate the two men in his praise, which is fitting considering both came from Arista to Atlantic in 1977 as a team: “Thank goodness for Perry and Michael for believing.”
In 1977, according to Jim Delehant, Kalodner got quietly shifted from the New York office to Los Angeles “to keep an eye on that scene.” Two years later Klenfner also left the Atlantic building at 75 Rockefeller Plaza but, unlike Kalodner, went out all guns blazing.
* * *
It’s a mostly neglected detail in AC/DC biographies but the United States in the mid to late 1970s was in the grip of disco fever. Atlantic’s investment in AC/DC, even after they’d decided to stick with the vertically challenged Australians, wasn’t a fait accompli. Another set of Aussie brothers, The Bee Gees, was doing much bigger business than AC/DC. Their manager Robert Stigwood’s RSO label had been distributed by Atlantic from 1973 to the end of 1975, Ahmet Ertegun even introducing the Gibbs to producer Arif Mardin, who reinvented their career with “Jive Talkin’.” But Ertegun didn’t stop them switching labels after they received a massive offer from Polydor, owned by PolyGram.
It was a decision Jerry Greenberg calls “a big mistake”; which it was, considering the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack would go on to be certified platinum 15 times in the United States alone. But Atlantic had other aces up its sleeve.
“In 1976–77, Atlantic was voted the disco company of the year,” says Greenberg. “We had Chic, Sister Sledge, The Trammps. Radio was into disco. FM radio was just starting. We weren’t getting that much radio play for AC/DC. So how do you break a band if they’re not getting any radio play? You’ve got to build fans. How do you build fans? You need to perform. How do they perform but only get paid $300 from the Whisky A Go-Go? They’ve got to get money from a record company.
“I supported them not only with coming down from the presidential office to the troops [and telling them] that they needed this band but also by writing the checks. AC/DC were very heavily in the red before they finally broke. There were times when I had to go up against corporate when it came to writing those checks for ‘tour support,’ but I said, ‘Don’t worry. You’re going to get it back. The group’s going to happen.’
“We supported The J. Geils Band in the beginning, The Allman Brothers, Black Oak Arkansas, The Marshall Tucker Band. You go through the history of Atlantic and you see these rock bands that we were able to break. How did we do it? Touring. Touring, touring, touring.”
A logistical and organizational job that fell largely to Doug Thaler, who had met George Young while performing with their respective bands on the Gene Pitney Cavalcade of Stars, modeled after Dick Clark’s traveling show.
Thaler was employed by a booking group called the Thames Agency when he first heard buzz about this band of fist-waving scruffs from Australia. One of Thames’s clients was Deep Purple, whose roadies’ notorious scrap with AC/DC at Sunbury in 1975 had piqued Thaler’s interest. (Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore later called AC/DC “an all-time low in rock ’n’ roll.”) He dutifully got his hands o
n a copy of High Voltage, flipped it over and saw the names “Vanda” and “Young.” By then “It’s a Long Way to the Top” was, he says, “getting played like crazy” in Columbus and Jacksonville.
“I said, ‘You have got to be kidding me!’ I’d lost track of them. So when I saw their names and saw there was the brothers [Angus and Malcolm], I got a phone number for Alberts in Sydney and I called them up. And we had some good laughs. It had been eight years by then. So I said, ‘I’d really like to book the guys in the United States.’ I think [the Youngs] were happy to have somebody involved that they knew themselves.”
Thaler made the arrangement official in March 1977 when he went to London to see AC/DC perform at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park.
“I made a deal with [UK booking agent] John Jackson and Michael Browning to represent AC/DC in America—already having received the blessing of George and Harry.”
It was a propitious deal for both parties. Having joined a new agency, ATI, Thaler ended up booking AC/DC’s first five tours in the United States and rostered them on to a line-up of acts that included Cheap Trick, REO Speedwagon, Kiss and UFO. Between 1977 and 1979, roughly the two years it took for them to become an American arena attraction in their own right, there was hardly a major band AC/DC didn’t headline with, support or fall under on a festival undercard: The Dictators, Michael Stanley Band, .38 Special, Nazareth, Triumph, Mahogany Rush, Foreigner, Alvin Lee, Santana, Head East, Mink DeVille, Johnny Winter, Heart, Rush, Styx, Ronnie Montrose, Aerosmith, Poco, Rainbow, Savoy Brown, Molly Hatchet, Ram Jam, Van Halen, Alice Cooper, Blue Öyster Cult, Boston, The Doobie Brothers, Journey, Ted Nugent, Thin Lizzy and more. Future Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and his company Harvey & Corky promoted their shows in Buffalo, New York. According to Nate Althoff’s acdc-bootlegs.com, between 1977 and 1979 the band did 442 gigs, mostly in the United States, England and mainland Europe: an average of 147 a year. In 1976 alone, before they even got to the States in July ’77, they’d racked up an incredible 183. In 1980, they did 135. In 1981, rolling in it after the success of Back in Black, they did just 74. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers clocked—a blur of promoters, diners and hotel rooms.
It wasn’t always an easy sell.
At one show in December 1977, supporting Kiss at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, the local newspaper’s concert reviewer was so appalled by what he had seen from the two “gross-out groups” he was moved to remark, “It’s hard to see where groups like Kiss and AC/DC can go from here.”
At another show, headlining Cheap Trick in Johnson City, Tennessee, in September 1978, one critic sneered, “The show as a whole was little more than amplified noise loud enough to burst the eardrums of anyone who hadn’t thought to bring some cotton along … the crowd loved it, but it all only went to show that AC/DC’s forte lies not in the music but in the show.
“As for that crowd, it was rowdy and young. Most of the intoxicated faces looked hardly old enough to be done with the Clearasil. This group will soon learn that AC/DC is not classic music, and their albums will gather dust while more sophisticated music is played.”
But wherever AC/DC performed, airplay followed. Even when they couldn’t get their hands on new material, radio announcers proved resourceful.
“When I received the Australian version of Dirty Deeds, Atlantic got a little upset and said they were working High Voltage,” remembers Bill Bartlett. “It took them long enough. They, in so many words, wanted me to back off from AC/DC because it did not fit into their master plan. Of course, I could not do that. It was difficult to back off from Dirty Deeds after I played it on the radio.”
Says Tony Berardini: “I went to our local import music store and grabbed Dirty Deeds and began playing ‘Jailbreak’ as an import. The listeners loved it.”
* * *
In 1977 Peter Mensch, who two years later as an employee of Leber-Krebs would supplant Michael Browning as manager of AC/DC, wrote a university thesis called An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Radio Airplay and Advertising on Record Sales. The equation was simple: “Support of a tour by a record company will demonstrate to radio program directors that the artist is important to the company and thus might have something to offer their audiences … unless the product is promoted by the record company, it won’t get airplay.”
But Nick Maria says the number-one challenge for the Australian band was visibility—literally, stock in record shops. Once they had visibility the rest followed. And touring achieved it.
“Visibility, having them in the stores, was difficult when they had no airplay,” he says. “They stayed on the road forever. I don’t know how they did it, but they did it.”
Larry Yasgar recalls having to chase their music around the country.
“Wherever they got airplay I had to follow it,” he says. “I’d have to get stock into the various markets. If a record went on [the air], I had to make sure it got into those stores. A lot of times we’d give the singles away for nothing just to get a sense if the record was going to happen based on airplay.”
Steve Leeds was behind promotional tours for bands such as The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin at Atlantic. When things were starting to happen for AC/DC, as he saw it, it was Texas where the loudest racket was being made on the airwaves.
“Texas was the market that first really embraced AC/DC in the United States,” he says. “A little station in Texas started playing AC/DC: KMAC/KISS in San Antonio. Bill Bartlett was an early supporter but the real support was in San Antonio. San Antonio is a very blue-collar town. It’s where the Alamo is. KMAC/KISS was appealing to a working-class male and I think AC/DC was something they understood. A lot of the hard-rock bands had their first initial success in Texas, particularly San Antonio. Florida was another place. Redneck rock. The South embraced that hard-rock sensibility.”
Yasgar, for his part, pinpoints the Midwest as the crucible of the AC/DC liftoff.
“AC/DC to me started in the Midwest,” he says. “Cleveland. Detroit. Chicago. That was a big rock area for us. In fact, with all our records we would concentrate on the Midwest. That’s where the concentrated airplay was.”
* * *
One look at AC/DC’s US summer tour dates for Let There Be Rock shows how important those working-class and “redneck” areas were to the rise of AC/DC: Texas, Florida, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, with New York and California at the tailend. In the winter, the band did a bunch of dates in Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
After seeing Dropkick Murphys in Boston, I drive down to Tennessee via Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina and cut back to Massachusetts via Kentucky and West Virginia. AC/DC is rarely off the radio, even in the rural backroads. Nashville, incidentally, is where AC/DC would part ways with the manager who’d got them to the States—Michael Browning—in September 1979. It was the last time he’d ever see the Youngs.
John Wheeler, the lead singer of Hayseed Dixie, a “rockgrass” band from Nashville that shot to fame (and the top of the country charts in Australia) in 2001 with A Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC, an album of covers, first heard AC/DC on the radio around the age of 10 and remembers that “it just sort of jumped out of the speakers—it was on about 12 times a day—then Back in Black came out and I don’t think the radio played much else for the next two years.”
He insists Nashville’s reputation as a country-music town is erroneous.
“Nashville actually isn’t particularly country. It’s known internationally for that musical style, but only because there is a branch of the music industry there that cranks out a cookie-cutter version of ‘country’ music. Most of the local people in Nashville are no more interested in, say, Tim McGraw or whichever is the latest country ‘hat act’ than they are in any other American city. There are more rock and pop radio stations than country ones.
“There are always more blue-collar people in any city than white-collar
ones; this is the case everywhere in the world. In Nashville and the South, the same people who loved Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr also loved AC/DC. If you went to a Hank show in the 1980s, half the audience would be wearing AC/DC T-shirts and vice versa.”
Music is important in the American South because the reality of daily life can be pretty humdrum compared to the big cities on the East and West Coasts. But smalltown America is the real America. The waitress who’s seen better years wiping down the counter in the café. The Creedence song on the radio. The young girls in flipflops and NFL sweatpants catching up for gossip on the street. Listening to country music on the road, it strikes me that the themes are pretty much constant: being reassured that all you need to be happy with your lot is a tin roof over your head, a porch to drink beer on, a beautiful woman in your bed and mud on the soles of your shoes. AC/DC’s music reassures in the same way. It elevates you by breaking down life to some pretty basic requirements: sex, drink and rock. Wherever you live, whatever your background, the intended effect is the same: to make you move with the rhythm, to forget your troubles. It’s arguably why, more than any other rock band in the world, AC/DC connects with “real” people.
They achieved that lofty status not only through graft and talent, but through the investment of time and money on the part of the people the Youngs entrusted with making their career happen. In most tellings of the AC/DC story it’s those people who tend to get short shrift.
“With AC/DC we had to really put the money in,” says Greenberg. “That’s what we did. I think probably one of their big breaks was opening for Aerosmith and a couple of other big bands after they went to Leber-Krebs. It really helped. There was no MTV during those early days. The only way you could break a band was to just put them in that van and ship ’em around.”
